President David O. McKay Believed That Joseph Smith Wrote The Book of Mormon
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 1:22 am
Have you ever wondered why David O. McKay never once publicly testified of the divinity/truthfulness of the Book of Mormon? Well, wonder no more. Reddit has a very interesting post about an interview with Hugh Nibley where Hugh stated that President McKay believed Joseph Smith was the author of the Book of Mormon. I doubt you will ever hear this taught in Sunday School.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mormon/comment ... utm_term=1Greg Prince chapter of Joseph Geisner's Writing Mormon History. Here's the relevant text:
I interviewed Hugh Nibley in 1995, in his office at BYU. Nibley was probably the preeminent LDS scholar-apologist of the 1950s and 1960s. "Popcorn" is a good metaphor for the interview, for he popped from one subject to another, rarely completing one narrative before moving to the next. To get the essence of an important part of the interview, I include it verbatim: "I had a talk–I don't think I should even tell you about this. I had a real argument with David O. McKay. No, I won't tell you about it, because I have never told anybody about it."
He then asked me to turn off the recorder, which I did, after which he related a time in the mid-1960s when, upon returning from a trip to Israel to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, he made an appointment with McKay. He was excited to tell the president that the scrolls "will prove the historicity of the Book of Mormon," and shocked when McKay replied, "Well, we already know that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon." He blamed O. C. Tanner, a former LDS educator and very successful businessman, for polluting McKay's mind on the subject, and spent much of the rest of his career trying to reinstate the Book of Mormon as an authentic ancient record.
He then allowed me to turn on the recorder again, and a few minutes later, this time on the record, he retold the same story:
At that particular time, Brother McKay was under strong pressure from O.C. Tanner, I think, who was his very dear friend. They talked down the Book of Mormon, they didn't only neglect it. Of course, that group up there, they really talked it down. Well, the main thing, as we [Tanner and Nibley] were driving back to the bus station, O.C. Tanner said to me, "We've got to get rid of the Book of Mormon. That's why we had this meeting. It's driving the best minds out of the Church. We can't have it any more. Now you don't understand this, but me, with my training and my education, I can see all these things." And then I [Nibley] started giving him some arguments. He [Tanner] got so mad he could hardly control himself. We had a time. And I've never told anybody about that. That's the way it was. But I've always admired and loved President McKay. That's why I've never told anybody about it. But he said that, "Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon."